I just heard a colleague’s Preacher’s Nightmare story from this morning: she was up in the high pulpit of her historic church during the pre-sermon hymn and realized that she didn’t have her sermon. She made a mad dash down the stairs, down the aisle and to her study, grabbed a copy of her sermon off her desk and made it back up into the high pulpit just in time to give the sermon.
There must be something in the air: I forgot my reading glasses today and had to subtly beat it into my study during the Children’s Message to fetch them.
This leads me to ask the preachers among us: where do you save your work? Do you make hard copies or the liturgy and sermon or do your use an electronic device, notecards, or what?
I usually print out the entire service and send copies to myself at four (FOUR) different e-mail addresses that link to various devices, including my general gmail account. If all else fails (and it did once!) I can read off of my phone. I don’t recommend that!
I surreptitiously use my iPhone from the pulpit as a remote to run slide shows when we use them, and my Kindle or iPad for liturgical elements that require me to be mobile (I also use them for weddings). I occasionally preach from notes I read off my iPad, but I find the swiping to be distracting to watch as a worshiper, and I’m always a bit nervous the device will switch off or get glitchy at a terrible moment.
How about glitches, batteries dying, and such? I’ll advise on how to handle that in my next post. For now, darlings, g’night! It was very warm today so I took advantage of the gorgeousness and went swimming in the ocean after church and also took a nice, long walk. I’m bushed. Smooches.
I preach off my iPad, and have for years. I e-mail it to myself as a .pdf and end up scrolling through it – less distracting than either swiping or fiddling with paper. I always make sure that I e-mail it to myself, get it downloaded, and plug the iPad in to charge the night before – if I’m ever feeling lazy and think that I’ll wait until Sunday morning, I remind myself of the week when I woke up on Sunday morning to no electricity!
I’m an LLM, so don’t preach that often, but when I do, I preach from a pâper hard copy – if I did forget to take it to church, I’d be up the creek without a paddle – but it’s never happened yet. I suppose I could phone my husband and ask him to email it (he doesn’t come to church) but reading it from the phone would be tricky. I’m afraid I’m not confident enough to preach from notes – or, as my rector does, entirely without notes. I neither trust myself, nor the inspiration of the Holy Spirit!
If I’m leading the Prayers of the People, I’ll email them to myself & read them off my phone. I don’t imagine anyone is watching me, so the distraction of scrolling/swiping isn’t there.
I’m a second career pastor. I go to the sanctuary to practice, and edit the sermon the day before, and tuck it under the paraments on the pulpit, so it doesn’t happen to me. That does not prevent my semi- regular nightmare of going to preach and not having the sermon there from occurring–not unlike the recurring nightmare when I was a nurse of ending the shift and never having given the medications or checked blood pressure, or the one where I go to take an exam in high school and never went to the class. [Ah yes, the Stress Nightmare! I know it so well! – PB]
I used an iPad for years, and never had a lick of trouble. I saved the sermon in DropBox from my computer as a pdf, pulled it up from DropBox on my iPad, and scrolled through it to preach. I never have to worry about dropping pages or cards.
I now have a 2-in-1 laptop where the keyboard flips back and the screen becomes a tablet. I save my sermon, written in Word, as a pdf, and preach from that. No more DropBox.
The very wonderful thing about living in the rectory next door is that I can forget an awful lot and still able to retrieve it within the span of a reading or a hymn. I have never forgotten my sermon, though . . . I think my pre-service routine spares me that particular source of anxiety.
But, OH HAVE I HAD THOSE STRESS DREAMS. The worst is when I’m driving, driving, driving and just can NOT find the church!!
At the risk of adding to anyone’s stress dreams…
When I sub for the senior minister, I preach three times: 9:15 and 10:30 at one location, then drive ten minutes to preach 11:00 at second campus.
Last week between the two earlier services, an efficient usher picked up my sermon and put it in the recycling box. Fast forward to mad dash to search through recycling, found the sermon, then took some deep breaths to get my heart rate back down.
The moral of the story is, if you preach from a paper manuscript, never put it down!!